Not really surprising, since regexen with quantifiers can be expensive:

Avoid regular expressions with many quantifiers.... Such patterns can result in exponentially slow backtracking behavior unless the quantified subpatterns match on their first “pass”.
— The Camel Book, 4th Edition, p. 693.

Hello, one important thing i learned in the short time i'm on PM is: there is no reason to be ashamed to ask something that i don't know or understand. So i must confess that i have a problem to interpret the output of Benchmark in the right way. I didn't use this module very much yet.

I know when i use cmpthese, the results are sorted from slow to fast. When i say $count = -10, my code runs for 10 wall clock seconds.

Then, in the rate column i can see the amount of iterations per second for each of the subs that i benchmarked - in our (first) case:

You’re quite right, I should have said “up to 6 times faster”. I was looking at the figure of 496%, and thinking “that’s almost 5,” but that figure is actually the increase in rate expressed as a percentage of the original. That is,